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Sunday, June 03, 2012

I’m on on the south side of Chicago in Hyde Park,
in President Obama’s neighborhood. Hype Park isn’t the urban jungle of
poor and violent Black people that white people picture when they think of the
southside. But Hyde Park is in the middle of it, anchored and isolated by the
seemingly infinitely wealthy and mostly white University of Chicago with its
own well equipped police force, in addition to the Chicago Police department,
that protects its students and faculty on this island of privilege.

And President Obama is home today raising millions
for his campaign war chest.

I’m writing this entry from an old red brick
mansion used to create the atomic bomb, later home to the Bulletin of The
Atomic Scientists. Today, after years of disuse, its final incarnation is a
series of U of C graduate students' art studios. Outside is a community garden
with raised beds due to the soils 440 ppm lead count. 400ppm would be normal.
The students call it Doomsday, which is in keeping with today’s unemployment
numbers.

Earlier, while ordering a sandwich in a Hyde Park
deli, a Black mother read the headline of today’s Chicago Sun Times newspaper,
entitled “President Obama’s Job Problem.” She remarked to her husband that, “No
president had to deal with as much as he has.” Continuing the myth that the
titanic called the American economy is everybody’s fault but President Obama’s.
President Obama didn’t create this mess, but by entrusting U.S. economic policy
to the very same silk stocking bankers who destroyed our economy, he has held
the course while being a good steward of the American Empire, just like George
W. Bush. President Obama has turned his back on the legacy of Franklin Delano
Roosevelt and Lyndon Baines Johnson, who lifted the United States out of very
dark times by first admitting that we were in a crisis and then charting a
drastic course of change.

The Southside of Chicago is 95 percent Black and
the University of Chicago is expanding: encroaching further into West Garfield
Park and building multimillion dollar buildings where Black homes used to be.
Yet, I have not seen one Black construction worker, and Black unemployment is
around 60 percent in West Garfield Park. The poverty rate of Black children is
38 percent, but this President avoids the word poverty like the plague, as
opposed to rallying the country around the crises of poverty and unemployment.
For the month of May, only 69,000 jobs were created and the March and April
numbers then heralded by President Obama were over-inflated by 49,000 jobs,
meaning a net increase of a measly 20,000 jobs, which doesn’t come close to
matching the population growth. And the jobs that were created are
service sector jobs or “Macjobs” suitable for high school students, but
nonetheless snatched up by displaced adult workers.

Meanwhile under the Obama watch, not only are many
states imposing crippling restrictions on the recently jobless applying for
unemployment but, by the end of June, Emergency Unemployment benefits will
permanently terminate in twenty-four states, and by the end of August in
another thirty-five states. This will dump another 500, 000 Americans off
unemployment and out of the employment radar screen. And because even
liberal news outlets refuse to speak to the thousands of people who’ve given up
looking for work and are no longer counted in the unemployment numbers because
their benefits have ended, I would not be surprised if the Obama administration
starts proudly proclaiming that the unemployment fell by 500,000 to boost his
chances of wining the election.

I still maintain that President Obama has done more
for the corporate banking institutions and the war profiteers than he’s done
for the poor and working class, and in this equation I think he’s done less for
Black people over all. And because he’s Black, we have allowed him to get
away with policies and a lack of action that would have stirred outrage if he
were white.

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"I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids - and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me." Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

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I am an invisible man.

Chapter One;
It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naive. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself. But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man!"